Handy Farm Devices and How to Make Them: Traditional Farm Tools, Homemade Equipment, and Practical Rural Ingenuity

By Rolfe Cobleigh

Book Overview

Handy Farm Devices and How to Make Them is a practical early twentieth-century guide to farm ingenuity, homemade tools, barnyard improvements, and self-reliant rural workmanship. Written by Rolfe Cobleigh, associate editor of American Agriculturist, the book gathers hundreds of devices, plans, contrivances, and labour-saving ideas for the working farm: gates, troughs, racks, carts, handles, fences, harness conveniences, poultry equipment, stable fittings, garden aids, and many other useful improvements. The 1912 Orange Judd printing identifies the book as illustrated and gives the original copyright date as 1909.

Cobleigh's book belongs to a practical tradition in which farmers, homesteaders, and rural mechanics solved problems with local materials, careful observation, and plain construction rather than expensive manufactured equipment. Its value now is both functional and historical: it preserves the everyday engineering of American farm life before full mechanisation, while still offering ideas of interest to readers of homesteading, sustainable agriculture, old farm tools, rural history, and traditional do-it-yourself craft. Handy Farm Devices and How to Make Them is a useful reference for collectors, historians, smallholders, makers, and readers interested in the practical intelligence of earlier farm life.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1604595868
• ISBN13: 9781604595864
• Release Date: March 2009
• Publisher: Wilder Publications
• Length: 204 Pages
• Weight: 0.75 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

An asset to the self sufficient dreamer!

Yes this is a ver valuable book! Dont want to or just cant afford to buy or rent expensive machinery to do the basic farm duties many have done before the age of technology? THIS IS A MUST!!

Excellent, practical, book

This book is filled with tons of little tricks and devices to make farm life easier. Much of the information is old and so it may not be of as much use to someone with a high tech farm, but if you still do some things the old fashioned way, this book probably has something that can help you. And even if you can't use the stuff, it's interesting to read.

Pure practicality & lots of nostalgia

Handy Farm Devices is a really great book if you'd like to read about early 20th century practical living. There's no fluff here; just practical tips for simple living, and lots of good ideas for fixing/making things around the house.

Book is worth its weight in GOLD!

I bought this book on 29-Feb-00 because I am inheriting a farm in West Virginia. I read through it last night and am 110% convinced that the ideas in this book will cut my workload in half and make my life better when I move to the farm. I have placed 27 yellow stickies in this book; one for each idea that I will be able to use in the coming year. If you own a farm, buy this book!

This book will save you both time and money.

This reprint of the 1909 classic should be on the shelf of every serious homesteader. Farming is hard work, and this book will teach you how to save both time and money to get the job done. In this little gem you'll learn how to make your own tools for your workshop, how to build things for around the house, for the barns, and for your livestock, in addition to other devices for your garden and orchard, including a section that discusses fence-making and gate-making. Several pages are devoted to building a farmhouse (including the floor plan for my wife's "dream house"), barns, and other outbuildings. This book also makes for very entertaining reading. Peppered throughout are worthwhile quotes from famous (and not-so-famous) farmers from the past. I'm glad I found this book. I hope you will be, too!